


We'll Have Trouble All Our Days

by Figure_of_Dismay



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Dreams, F/M, hidden memories, life on earth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-26 02:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16672624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/Figure_of_Dismay
Summary: Eleanor is living her new, trying to do better life on earth, but that night at that bar on her birthday sparked something in her. And not what it was supposed to spark. She's got a lot of questions and not a lot of answers, but of course Eleanor's never been one to just give up when there's something she wants.2.12 Desert Rose AU.Michael/Eleanor pairing.





	We'll Have Trouble All Our Days

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is about Michael/Eleanor as a romantic pairing. If that's something you'd like to read, I'm glad I could provide. If that's something you don't like to think about, please move on. Thank you.
> 
> Rating based on this first chapter, and is subject to change in further parts. (what I mean is, probably it will go up, so keep an eye out.)
> 
> Title comes from Kate and Anna McGarrigle's song "Why Must We Die" 
> 
> We are meat, we are spirit  
> We have blood and we have grace  
> We have a will and we have muscle  
> A soul and a face  
> Why must we die  
> Why must we die
> 
> We are men of constant sorrow  
> We’ll have trouble all our days  
> We never found our Eldorado  
> Where we were born

What do we owe each other, the strange bartender had said, and the phrase had resonated with the intense look in his eyes as a weird kind of come on. She was used to being hit on by older men, for whatever reason her smallness, her paleness, her scorn all seemed to attract them. Sometimes, when she was bored and lonely and at a low ebb she took them up on it, their gratitude was a thrill in its own way, but usually she brushed it off. Usually she didn't see the appeal. There was something funny about this guy though. Something like magnetism, or recognition, mutual recognition, stranger to stranger and eye to eye that for Eleanor often amounted to the same thing. 

The bar had been deserted, just her and the bartender with the sleek white hair and the long but well proportioned face. He interested her. She couldn’t get a read on his age, she felt sure that whatever she guessed, he was both older and younger than that. She couldn’t get a read on what he wanted from her either. She knew he wanted something, she wasn’t stupid, she could read his sustained gaze, his faint smile, the urgency of his attention which she could taste on the air. From behind the gentling film of alcohol and exhaustion, where she floated in perspective-shifting remove, she absorbed his interest. Her heart beat hard. She didn’t recognize the feeling she was having but it was strong.

She rambled, she flirted, she leaned forward on the bar and peered up at him with big, wistful eyes the way she knew won men over. He didn't take the bait. He didn't leer or lob innuendo. She wanted him to say, so come on baby, we can go back to my place. She wanted the thrill of turning him down. She wanted, secretly more than that, the thrill of taking him up on it. She found herself wondering what kind of place he had, what his car would be like. What his sheets would be like. If he would want her on that bed, or somewhere else. (German, she thought, for the car, or something weird and old and collectable that he was embarrassingly proud of. Navy, she guessed for the sheets, cotton but high thread count. And she thought he looked like the type who secretly wanted her over the back of something, but would think the decent thing was to put her in a bed and play nice. There was a hell of a height difference to consider after all.) 

He didn't. He didn't any of that. He got her name and he got her talking, real, wrenching, over-real kind of talking, like he was some kind of barroom therapist. He let her ramble and he smiled and smiled, sad in a way that made her stomach swoop when she remembered, later, in her own bed, trying to make sense of things. But he didn't make a pass. He sent her home. 

She dreamt that night, after she had taken off the red dress and brushed her teeth and crawled between her cool, grey bargain bin sheets, of talking with the bartender again. Only they weren't in the bar, and in the dream she wasn't drunk. They weren't even in Arizona, she thought, she was pretty sure. They walked through a garden, and it was night, sweet smelling and dewy and green, with cool, damp air on her skin, and though it was night the flowers, unknown ones with pretty nodding cups of pink and red, bloomed as they passed with gaudy extravagance. She remembered thinking clearly, like funeral flowers, and laughing a bitter laugh that her waking self did not understand. 

She dreamt that she walked with the tall man, the bartender with the kind eyes and wicked smile, and that she knew him. He rested his hand on her back, fingers settled in the curve of her waist and as they walked she settled more and more into his side. Her throat was thick with emotion, and a feeling like the slow tick of a final clock filled her chest with an urgency. She kept thinking, okay, we better say some things, just in case, we’re running out of time, she couldn't seem to do it. She couldn't make her mouth form any words. Her watchful waking brain couldn't even think what those words ought to be. 

“Well, Eleanor,” the dream-man said beside her, bravely sad, with a bluff grimness, “Now that it's over, I have to say, it wasn't all bad, was it?” 

“No, you're right,” she replied, in the same tone, breathing through a strangling grip around her chest of impossibility and hope, the terrible certainty of time running out, “not all bad, at all.”

They walked and walked in the strange garden. It was The Last Night, in the dream she knew this although nothing was said. When daylight came, as it would as if it were a normal garden in a natural place, the ending would be upon them. She had been in a hurry to get to this point, without knowing the specifics, she remembered that, but now it was here, and the final unwinding of the clock frightened her. 

The man's hand and his body were warm, just as human as she was, reassuringly so. He wasn't calm either but he was familiar and he was quiet with her. She was tired, her feet plodding, but she didn't want to rest, didn't want to spend up and waste this last, last, last… 

When she woke, it was still dark, and she was breathing hard and ragged. Her face was wet. 

Eleanor didn't understand why, any of it, why. It was all out of proportion. He’d known her name, she realized, in real life, too. Somehow, without her saying. She turned over. She told herself to stop being so dumb. 

When her heart still rattled and shook with inexplicable loss behind her ribs, she promised herself that she'd go back in a day or two to that same bar with it's stupid pun name, and she'd talk to him again, ask him… ask what, say what? she had no clue, she would decide that later -- half believed that this was all a fairy story she was making up to soothe herself so that she would stop aching and sleep, and in sleep forget all of this -- but she would. She did not understand, felt that incomprehension threaten and overwhelm her like a fall from a great height, like something else unstoppable barreling towards her, but she would go back. 

**

The bar she’d been to with the man from her dream, as far as she could tell, didn’t exist. 

There was a bar and it sat in place where she figured it must have been, but it was called ‘the cactus spike’ and was upmarket, dim and minimalist and blared euro-techno-fusion music of a particularly unwelcoming strain. She walked around the block to be sure, and then around two blocks, and then around five blocks. She stopped in an alleyway, just inside the shade of a quiet cafe patio, canopied and stanchioned and screened for it’s diners’ comfort, stood sweated in the dry, hot air, thinking and scraping at her memory, tuning out the white noise of the cafe’s talkers and eaters who were having a perfectly normal day nearby. 

Three days wasn’t enough time to completely remodel, demolish, or move an entire night-spot, right? It wasn’t possible. She knew it wasn’t possible, and she knew -- she thought she knew -- what block they’d been on when she told the taxi guy to stop, let’s go there, that looks like my kind of place. 

This is where you give up this weird fixation, Eleanor, she told herself, this is a sign to stop.

Eleanor wasn’t good at stopping. Sometimes she didn’t know, or sometimes she did, something inside her shouting in horror as she carried on doing just what she ought not, at breakneck pace or like a stumbling victim of hypnosis. It was the man at the bar, she remembered, who talked about his friend (with so much fondness, he’d talked about this female-someone and Eleanor had been jealous, knowingly irrationally jealous) with the little voice inside, her conscience furiously muttering and going ignored, until it wasn’t. 

Was it Eleanor’s conscience telling her, time to stop, this doesn’t look normal, this is not a normal fixation. You were pretty much drunk. That man was a stranger. That man doesn’t care who you are. Or was her conscience the other one, the one that didn’t chatter, but sat chill and certain like instinct inside her tolling with resolve. Something is wrong. You have to remember. This is important.

That night, her birthday, had started in her a feeling like reaching for a soul-altering dream or like trying to remember the voice and face of your second grade teacher, the layout of your childhood school, like being reminded of a once-favorite song that had faded to a jangle of notes you could only almost recall. Something that had once been everything and now was so far off and ungraspable, that for some reason you need to recall so you that know who you are. She needed, she needed. She didn’t stop. 

She asked Brittany about it the next week, when they were going out for drinks again, Brittany making up for bailing before. She told her about the bar, the bartender, the free drinks, the advice, the come on that didn’t quite come. The feeling that she’d met him before. Eleanor told her about the minimalist dystopia spot that seemed to have replaced it overnight, how freaky was that. She didn’t say a word about the dream, she knew better than to confess to that, but she still said more than enough. Eleanor heard her own voice as she talked, the razorwire edge of urgency she couldn’t prevent. Eleanor could feel the flush of her face, could feel Brittany watching her with guarded skepticism, with concern. 

“Listen, Eleanor,” said Brittany, leaning her elbow on their table and lowering her voice, “Like. I know this year has been a weird one for you, and I’m saying this as your friend, but you need to know…. This is not the sanest you have ever sounded.”

“I’m not crazy,” snapped Eleanor, “I know I sound like a stalker. But how could that bar be there and then not? How did he know my name without me telling him? I just… need to figure this out, okay? This last year has been utter shit, and I just. I need to find this guy and ask him how he knows me.”

After drinks -- just one each because unsurprisingly Eleanor’s apparent imminent mental breakdown didn’t exactly inspire a relaxed time -- Brittany agreed to direct the cab to where she thought the Desert Rose was. Eleanor kept her mouth shut and tried to pretend there wasn’t a feedback loop in her nerves, telling her to hope and telling her not to hope. The cab pulled up in front of ‘the cactus spike,’ with it’s dark windows and pretentious, capital-less sign glowing in white on black. 

“Huh,” said Brittany, “Weird. That’s so weird. That wasn’t here last week.”

“See,” said Eleanor, seething with a sickening combination of vodka, disappointment and vindication, “See, I said. I’m not crazy. It’s just gone. Like. Snap.”

“Do you wanna go in? We could make fun of the hipsters,” offered Brittany.

“No, that’s okay. When I was looking before, all their drinks are obscenely overpriced. Sorry about tonight, man, but at this point I should just go home. Try and sleep off this mood.”

When the cab dropped her off, Brittany waved off her offer to split the fair. Eleanor knew it was a pity move, could sense that she’d shown too much. Brittany couldn’t understand why she cared about this small, seemingly insignificant apparent glitch in the universe. Eleanor didn’t blame her, exactly, not when she couldn’t explain it to herself, couldn’t see why she could still call exactly to mind that strange garden, the phantom warmth of his arm around her waist. A dream but not a dream. No, she couldn’t blame Brittany for thinking she was acting strangely.

This time though, she didn’t even pretend to believe she would stop. Not now, not after the year she’d had, not after she’d torn away and discarded nearly every familiar thing. For the duration of one conversation, unsettling and improbable as it had been, her life had made sense. The world had seemed less vast and bleak. 

And it was impossible. The bar didn’t exist. Maybe the man didn’t exist -- her heart squeezed in her chest at the thought. But she had been offered a glimpse of something she didn’t understand, and she wanted. She wanted. Eleanor had learned long ago to hunt down more than what she was offered.

** 

It was almost Halloween, the holiday of the year Eleanor almost cared about, and the clear Arizona days were finally starting to cool. Brittany and her boyfriend were going to a Halloween party held in a friend’s -- a vague acquaintance of opportunity type friend, Eleanor suspected -- bar downtown and Eleanor was tagging along. She felt more awkward than usual about playing the third wheel on a party night, but the last couple of months had been oppressively difficult and dispiriting, so she knew she needed to get out and be among people, even if it was just for a night of shouting to be heard over dubious music and bad, buzzed dancing with strangers. Her goals were to lose herself just enough to unwind, drink just enough to relax but not get hungover or go home with an opportunistic sleazebag in a moment of weakness. If she could, at the same time, convince Brittany that she hadn’t lost her mind, her personality or her marbles by demonstrating recognizable behavior patterns, so much the better.

Getting ready for the night, Eleanor put on a red dress. It wasn’t fruit-red or candy-red, but deep, bloodlike devilish red. It wasn’t the one she’d worn barhopping on her birthday, though her hand had hovered speculatively over it’s hanger, but one from the depths of her closet, from her younger, more reckless clubbing days. It wasn’t indecent an it wasn’t showy, and it was slightly dated, but it was short, eye-catchingly short and slinky, sleeveless imitation silk crepe over a satiny slip with a bias skirt and a low waist that made her a feel like a flapper extra escaped from the set of Chicago or Gatsby. It had always worked well for her, playing up her grudgingly doll-like looks but also spelling out explicitly her daring. Men and women alike seemed to appreciate the invitation to protect and tease, the implication that she was vulnerable but knew how show you a good time. It was an implication she knew how to follow up with action when the mood took her, which was probably why it worked so well.

To the red dress, she added low heeled red shoes, good for a night on her feet. Like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in reverse, she thought, for going the opposite of home, though hers didn’t glitter with sequins. She lined her eyes and put on strong red lipstick, painting her face with clinical detachment in the mirror. She didn’t meet her own eyes. For the trashy piece de resistance, she put on a red plastic headband with red light-up devil horns, skull pinching but seasonal, and flicked the tiny switch to make them glow. 

Not, perhaps, in keeping with her new and improved lifestyle choices, she thought. But then again the costume did not make the woman, and if she kept a hold of herself, what night was better for a little indulgence than Halloween? And if she hoped, deep down, that she might not find the end of the night alone in her sterile grey, too wide bed, troubled by more unsettling, impossible dreams, what could a miserable little hope hurt, really? Didn’t even decent, gently raised, morally sound women everywhere entertain such hopes from time to time?

The plan had been to take a cab over to Brittany’s and go in that cab with her and her boyfriend to the party all together, in order not to be stuck with a car and to not have to find each other in the crowd. Brittany had texted, though, as Eleanor was heading out the door, and said that the boyfriend was running about 20 minutes late and Eleanor should just head on over, they could meet up later. Year before last, Eleanor would have called Brit a drag for putting her boyfriend first, told her to make him find them later, but this year she’d made herself realize that boyfriends came before friends and that she shouldn’t begrudge the natural order of things. Current, working on herself Eleanor just sighed and agreed and told Brit it was okay.

She gave the driver the address for the bar and spent the short ride over quiet and preoccupied. On the sidewalk, in her devil dress and horns, she was distracted by paying the cab fare and making sure her wallet and phone were well secured in her small purse. It was a brisk night outside, the dry breezy chill of impending autumn in the desert, a crackling, arid cold. She wished she’d worn a coat after all, even though keeping track of it later would have been a pain. She shivered as the cab drove off and turned around to hurry inside. 

The friend of a friend’s bar was called Syzygy, a pretentious word for conjunction, or planetary alignment, convergence. Maybe coincidence, Eleanor wasn’t sure, but she knew that faux mysticism was a reliable attraction in Arizona. She was just glad it wasn’t called Serendipity, like the Kate Beckinsale movie. The bar in front of her didn’t say Syzygy over the door, though. Instead there was a round neon sign that said Desert Rosé

There was a long, strained pause as her eyes and her brain struggled to agree with each other about whether or not what she was seeing could really be what she believed she was seeing. Then she took a shaky breath and accepted it, however unlikely. 

“Really?” she asked the empty sidewalk, with sharp, frantic irony. But she was not annoyed, not disappointed. There it was, after months of looking and consciously not looking, of wondering if she’d briefly lost her mind, and wondering if she’d ever stumble across that strange man again. There it was, just where it ought not to be. 

She stood still in the open air and tried very hard to decide that she wasn’t alarmed, that she didn’t feel the fabric of the world shifting and reforming around her like a malleable thing, permeable and without solidity. She tested herself, the world, by turning her back on the unexpected door and looking out at the empty street, and then turning back. The storefront hadn’t changed. She thought hard, or rather held herself hard back from thinking. Then Eleanor straightened her spine and marched through the door. 

There was no one in the bar besides the bartender. The bartender she’d spent more than two months wondering about, just as tall and angular, with the same long elegant face and the same well coiffed hair and the same mundane but strange magnetism. His shirt was different, crisp dove grey instead of the blue with green, but then again why would he be wearing the exact same thing? She asked herself, frowning. The sleeves were rolled up just the same though, and she watched his lean, strong forearms shift as he wiped a clean glass with a rag. His eyes were the same, too, sharp and avid, looking at her so piercing and hot and curious that Eleanor felt her skin prickle with-- something. Something that made her feet heavy and clumsy as she approached the bar. She was sober a sa judge but her head swam. The bartender watched her approach with a quirk of a smile, a secretive smile, familiar, so familiar. Eleanor set both hands flat on the edge of the counter, her sweaty palms catching and sticking against the thick smooth varnished wood.

“You,” she said, accusing she didn’t know what.

“Yes, Eleanor,” said the bartender, still with that secret smile. 

“How do you know my name?” she asked, but somehow not really mustering the suspicion she’d intended.

“That’s quite an outfit,” said the bartender. His smile grew deeper, teasing, asking.

“It’s Halloween,” she said crisply, “I’m the devil.”

The bartender laughed at that, a wry bark. His eyes twinkled at her like they were in on some kind of witty joke together, but she had no idea what that joke was supposed to be.

“The devil. I see,” he said.

“Who are you?” she demanded, suddenly desperate and furious and so confused that her chest ached and her ears buzzed faintly with stirred blood. “What is this place? It was here on my birthday, but not here, several blocks over, and then it was gone and now it’s where my friend’s bar should be, which is impossible. Really, really impossible! How can any of this be happening?”

“I want to answer your questions, Eleanor, I really do. But it’s more complicated than I can tell you,” he said sadly. He said her name in a way that she remembered from before, but it was not how other people said it, El-in-err, not El-an-or like she was used to. It was funny, and familiar, both in the sense of recognizing the sound of it, how it landed in her ear and deep in her stomach, and familiar in the sense of intimacy, as though he named her knowingly, more familiar than anyone.

“Do you remember me?” he asked, “You didn’t seem to that night that we talked, but then you kept looking I thought maybe you’d… I wondered… I had to check, you see. It makes a difference in how things might go.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she shouted, “I don’t understand what’s going on right now, but you’re going to explain. Or I’ll make you regret it, believe me.”

“I know this is confusing, I wish I could explain everything to you. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have come to see you before, but you needed help. You needed a push in the right direction. I didn’t think you’d react this way, though. It wasn’t me you were supposed to look for.”

“A little push in the right direction? What kind of fantasy are you having here? Who do you think you are, some kind of barroom midwestern retiree guardian angel?”

He laughed again, another sound of knowing amusement, again like she’d made some kind of profound and bitter inside joke. Another thing it felt like she should understand and didn’t.

“No, Eleanor,” he said, “Not an angel, that’s one thing I can tell you for sure. You know, I have never grasped the human concept of irony as completely as I do right at this moment.”

Eleanor blinked, feeling like her brain was rubberized, elasticized, and being stretched and pulled and mashed into a new and unfamiliar shape. What? She thought helplessly, and then tried it out loud-- “What?” it came out strangled and blank.

“Have you remembered? Is that why you looked for me?” asked the bartender again. He looked strained, conflicted.

Eleanor couldn’t decide if he wanted her to say yes or say no. she was good at reading people for what they wanted, it was mostly how she survived, but this guy was more opaque than most. Or maybe, more than likely, he didn’t know what he wanted himself. None of it made sense. Logically she should be terrified by this apparent lunatic stalker and his disappearing bar, but it was equally apparent to her that she very much wasn’t. She was angry, maybe, and bewildered into a frustrated tension but she wasn’t afraid. She thought of the dream she’d had, walking with their arms around each other through the dark garden. It was still as vivid to her has it had been months before, and that had only been the first of several about him, though only that first had been so stark and clear. There was something itching at the back of her mind, not like memory exactly, but like the place a memory would slide into if it should deign to appear.

The bartender had set down his glass and his rag. He leaned in across the bar counter. His expression was hungry. That was the only word that Eleanor had for his look, hungry, and then maybe sad. Hungry-sad, weary-sad, longing-sad, the kind of far-looking wishing and regret ascribed to characters in pulp romances, that Eleanor had always assumed to be too complex and profound for flesh and blood men to show in real life. Without knowing why, tears stood in her eyes, making striations of light and color out of the bar, the familiar-unfamiliar man.

“I just had to check, you see,” he said gently, “That my little push the other time hadn’t unlocked more than it was supposed to. I needed to make sure… But you’ll be alright, Eleanor. And I’m sorry, but it’s probably best if you don’t remember this.”

He raised one hand, a stomach swoopingly familiar and casual gesture, and set his fingers like a princely tsar about to snap his commanding whim.

“No!” she cried, unthinking, and lunged forward to grab his arm. His bare wrist was warm and taut under her fingers, his muscles tensed to spring under her palm. Another double-sighted feeling of deja vu rattled through her. “No, Michael,” she said clearly and slowly, as if a different, unknown self was talking through her numb and baffled mouth, “Don’t do that, not yet.”

“Well,” said Michael, softly, eyeing her as if she were the mysterious and dangerous thing, “That’s not supposed to happen.” 

**

Memory is, in theory, only electricity in the brain but perhaps it is more subtle than that as well. Maybe sometimes it is architecture, too, part of the fundamental structure and shaping of self. Perhaps when Michael took her memory and sent her off to live her best life in the human world beyond his domain, he had tried to send her off as the best version of herself, or the one that he knew best. And for all their minute variation, every version of Eleanor he’d known had been largely the same, only changed by repetition in the marginal particulars. Deep within the soft, unknowable tissue of her vulnerable human brain, within the bony shell of her human skull, the substance, the network of self had been reformed over time, some impulses strengthening, others eroding away, these fine neural connections were made and remade as he reset them, and despite impossibility, with each reset, Eleanor had seemed to start a little farther down the path she would each time go down. 

At first this had terrified him, it presented an inescapable threat to his sovereignty over his neighborhood. But with time, it had impressed him, how resilient she was, how inventive, how unstoppable, and then thrilled him that he got to witness this quick mind, this unstaggerable will. For a time he had even believed that she would outpace him, and save him. 

He had assumed that the resumption of her original human body, and the return to the unforgiving confines of time and human reality on earth would put her back at the beginning. That it would erase the subtle signatures of her time in the afterlife. But it seemed now that his assumption was wrong.

His own self, locked into apparent human form now, had once been a different kind of energy. A timeless, wordless, transdimensional kind of thought and substantial light, a consciousness without age, an awareness that did not breathe or breed or alter or learn or decay. He had made the transition to his present form now, it was not different from his self and it had changed him, but he still was not human. He was changeable now the way glass was a liquid, terribly slow and imperceptible flowing, humans changed the way rivers did, quick and appreciable, and they lived directly within their fragile skins. Humans could not be divorced from the structures and patterns of their flesh. He should have expected that, without obliterating self, the frames and buttresses, the architecture of memory would live in her mind as she lived, and if the right connections were formed or reformed in the conductive flesh that was central to thought-emotion-person, those memories could be visited and known again.

He could still erase this night. He could give her a better shot at continuing. He could still try and stop her from tainting her one extra chance before she’d barely even begun. But he couldn’t rewire her whole brain. Not and keep her the same Eleanor, still herself. He wasn’t allowed to tamper with her free will, either -- not that he wanted to deep down. He was self aware enough to see that. 

And she might remember again. What if she kept looking? He could take the memory of her birthday night, but then how would she know to look for Chidi? How would she know how to save herself?

Eleanor’s soft, small, furiously strong hand still gripped his wrist. He looked down into her curious, angry, seeking eyes. He thought involuntarily of the sight of her worried, loss-stricken face as she drifted out of his arms, into the cold safety of the vault portal. He thought of the way his miserable, vulnerable, half-human body had seemed to shut down around his last look at her, the memory of her small, breathing waist just gone from his hands. He’d thought then that he was on his way to eternal imprisonment or non-existence, and it hadn’t seemed that important while absorbing the fact that he would not see Eleanor again. At least, back then he had trust that she would be safe, lost to him but safe.

He could erase himself from her present memories and go, decide again that he would lose her to save her. But would it really save her? That she had remembered now, without the press of his powers to unlock it, meant it could happen again. And she might remember alone. She might drive herself mad, might decide herself insane, given what it was she would remember. Mortal humans were not meant to know and comprehend the the things he’d shown her, unwittingly and otherwise, over the last 300 years. 

Slowly, keeping her gaze to show that it wasn’t a trick, Michael put his arm down.

“Alright,” he said, “No resets. I mean it, Eleanor. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen now, but we’ve got to figure it out.” Then he sighed and shook his head in sheepish dismay. “But first,” he asked, “Can you take off that blinking and slightly racist monstrosity you’ve got on your head?”

“What? Oh, right, the devil horns, gotya. Well. That’s ironic, huh?” She plucked the horns from her head still blinking and tossed it to the bartop. 

The plastic headband stirred her find blonde hair, making it float palely about her face. Her eyes were lined with the dark smudges that humans seemed to think spelled evening enticement, and her thoughtful mouth was painted berry red, bright and sweet and womanly. Not the simple, barefaced look she’d worn in his neighborhood while pretending wholesomeness and acetic self denial, but it was an interesting look, he thought. Decorative coloring, startling and a little bit alien to him but compelling. What are you doing? He asked himself, as he realized the nature of his assessment of her face, and couldn’t couldn’t come up with an answer for himself.

“Ironic,” he agreed, nodding grave and bemusedly, “I’d guess that’s about the only word for it.”

**Author's Note:**

> apologies for any errors, this work is unbeta'd. 
> 
> With thanks to Inkywisps, Korzoff and Silver-Boots for playing sounding board during fic decision difficulties!! Couldn't have got this far without your input <3


End file.
